Farewell, Total Film

A great film magazine is ending its print life very soon.

Four days ago, a sad piece of news shook the English-speaking film community: after 27 years, the British magazine Total Film is ending its print run, continuing to exist online after the publication of issue 356, which is coming out on October 10. Many people – me included – posted tributes on social media, while also reminding readers that physical media do require genuine, tangible support to continue existing in the current cultural landscape.

Admittedly, I hadn’t actually read the magazine in years, for various reasons, but I still look back fondly on when I was an avid consumer of its print contents. The first issue I ever bought was published two decades ago, in the summer of 2004: Kirsten Dunst was on the cover, with Spider-Man 2 about to be released, and the main review of the month was Troy (a movie I’ve always had a soft spot for, despite its many deviations from the Iliad and other sources).

For a while, getting my hands on the magazine was contingent on whenever my family was vacationing in Finland (as it was not available in Italy, where we were living most of the year) or my father’s work trips to England. The first issue I got via the latter option had Jude Law on the cover and a feature devoted to the 50 best British films of all time. It proved an invaluable reference for some of my early infatuations with great UK cinema (Monty Python, Trainspotting, Get Carter).

Then, at the end of 2005, my parents gifted me a subscription, which went on for a couple of years (first issue I received as a subscriber had Peter Jackson’s King Kong on the cover), before I moved to Switzerland for my university studies and began gravitating more towards TF’s main competitor, Empire (which was available in Swiss shops).

Still, Total Film had a noticeable impact on my appreciation of movies: I still catch myself occasionally using a turn of phrase in a review that would not be out of place among those pages (in fact, their reviews in general planted an early seed in my mind about perhaps wanting to pursue film criticism professionally), and I loved the monthly humor page where they poked fun at a recent release (almost always a big US movie) via a brief parody of the script – an early example of how you can poke fun at something you’ve enjoyed (as the movies in question more often than not received positive reviews).

I still have a couple of the promotional DVDs they put out with the magazine, containing trailers for highly anticipated upcoming releases (this was in 2006, when YouTube was still in its infancy and watching trailers online could sometimes be a cumbersome undertaking), as well as the pocket book collecting some of their career-spanning interviews with actors and directors – often insightful, always entertaining.

As someone who, in this increasingly digital age, has the immense privilege of being able to write for some print publications (and has witnessed the demise of one of them: I was among the contributors for the final issue of the Swiss movie magazine Frame), my heart goes out to the entire Total Film team, past and present, who put out riveting content every month for almost three decades. For the final issue, the core team consisted of Matt Maytum, Jordan Farley, Matthew Leyland, Lauren Miles and Andy McGregor. I know most of them via Twitter, and they’re absolutely lovely people, worth a follow if you’re into that sort of thing.

And to my readers: if you are fans of print media, be sure to make your support known in concrete ways. You never know when it might no longer be viable to publish those articles in physical format…